It’s the official US Army Song Book from the Second World War. It begins, as you’d expect, with the Star Spangled Banner (three verses!), but the complete contents is eclectic, to say the least:

1. The Star Spangled Banner
2. Alma Mater
3. Aloha Oe
4. America
5. America, the Beautiful
6. Anchors Aweigh
7. The Army Air Corps
8. Song of the Army Engineer
9. Auld Lang Syne
10. Battle Hymn of the Republic
11. Bombed
12. The Caissons Go Rolling Along
13. Parody Field Artillery Song
14. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
15. Casey Jones
16. Cindy
17. Colombo
18. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean
19. Crash On! Artillery
20. Dixie
21. Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes
22. Arms for the Love of America (The Army Ordnance Song) by Irving Berlin
23. For Her Lover Who Was Far Away
24. For Sev’n Long Years
25. God Bless America
26. God of Our Fathers
27. Good Night, Ladies!
28. Home, Boys, Home! & The Infantry (there are two number 28′s: a SNAFU, I guess)
29. A Home on the Range
30. Honey Dat I Love So Well
31. I’ll Tell You Where They WEre
32. The Infantry (different than the previous one by this name)
33. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
34. I’ve Been Workin’ on de Railroad
35. Juanita
36. K-K-K-Katy, plus parodies of the chorus of K-K-K-Katy, such as “K-K-K-K. P., Dirty old K.P., That’s the only Army Job that I abhor…” or the even more evocative “C-c-c-cootie, Horrible cootie, You’re the only b-b-b-bug that I abhor…”)
37. The Last Round-Up
38. Let Me Call You Sweetheart
39. The Man on the Flying Trapeze
40. The Marines’ Hymn
41. The Mintrels Sing of an English King
42. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga
43. The Mountain Battery
44. My Buddy
45. My Wild Irish Rose (plus a parody, “My wild eyed cadet,/He ain’t learned nothing yet,/He noses her down/When close to the ground…”)
46. The New River Train
47. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
48. Oh! Susanna
49. The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be
50. Old Joe Clark (not a song about the former Canadian Prime Minister)
51. Old King Cole (with a modified chorus glorifying the “Fighting Infantry”: each chorus adds another rank, so the final chorus runs, “The Army’s gone to hell,” said the generals;”What’s my next command?” said the colonels;/”Where’re my boots and spurs?” said the majors;/”We want ten days’ leave,” said the captains;/”We do all the work,” said the shavetails;/”Right by squads, squads right,” said the sergeants;/”Beer, beer, beer,” said the privates,/”Merry men are we./There’s none so fair as can compare/With the Fighting Infantry.”
52. The Old Plantation
53. On, Brave Old Army Team
54. Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag
55. Pop! Goes the Weasel
56. The Raw Recruit
57. Red River Valley
58. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
59. Slum and Gravy & Sons of Randolph (there are two number 59s)
60. Smiles
61. Song of the Signal Corps
62. A Stein Song
63. Tammany
64. There’s a Long, Long Trail
65. Where Do We Go From Here?
66. Yankee Doodle
67. You’re in the Army Now

It’s an interesting mixture of sentimental old favorites, patriotic  songs, and songs poking fun at Army life. I like, for one example, Bombed:

We were bombed last night, bombed the night before

And we’re going to be bombed tonight as we never were bombed before.

When we’re bombed, we’re as scared as we can be,

They can bomb the whole darn Army if they don’t bomb me.

CHORUS

They’re over us, over us,

One little cave for the four of us,

Glory be to God, there are no more of us

Or they’d surely bomb the whole darned crew.

But I think my favorite part of the book is the warning you can see on the image of the inside front cover:

“This book is the property of the United States Government and its contents may be used only with the military services.”

Which means, of course, that every time since 1941 that anyone has sung “Home on the Range” or “That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” they’ve been breaking military regulations.

I’ve sung both many times myself. I feel so ashamed.

****

Most flowers are dead this time of year, but there’s one that only blooms in November: the poppy of Remembrance Day.

King George V created Remembrance Day in 1919 in memory of members of the armed forces who were killed during war. But it’s hard to remember a war and the soldiers who fought in it if you weren’t alive then…unless you make the effort to educate yourself about it.

I’ve recently become particularly interested in the First World War, through marriage. On my side of the family, I had some uncles who fought in the Second World War, but I rarely saw them and never talked to them about it. My father was too young to be involved.

However, my wife’s grandfather, Samson J. Goodfellow, served in the First World War, finishing it in a prisoner of war camp after the bomber he was navigating was shot down over enemy lines…and just recently, I read his memoirs. He lived in the house we’re now living in for 40 years, and it’s full of old photographs from the period. We even have his notebook that he took notes in while training to be a navigator. We have a couple of his wartime diaries. It’s made the First World War seem much closer than it ever did before.

The best First World War site I came across is First World War.Com. This is an amazing site, especially considering it’s run by a volunteer in his spare time. It includes information about the major battles and weapons, the war in the air, copies of primary historical documents, photographs, a timeline, a Who’s Who…and maybe most interestingly of all, a collection of vintage media, both sound recordings and some video.

The sound recordings include both spoken-word—German descriptions of life in the trenches, for example, and sound clips from the arrival of British troops in France—and lots of period music. Here’s Murray Johnson’s 1916 recording of one of the iconic songs of the First World War, “Pack Up Your Troubles.”

Another excellent site is For King and Empire, which is focused more specifically on Canadians in the Great War. It’s the official site for a six-part documentary by Breakthrough Films. This site also contains songs from the First World War, along with information about the battles, and perhaps most interestingly of all, a large archive of information about individual soldiers, with biographies and in many cases letters and diaries…like the one Sam Goodfellow kept.

More official sites are also excellent, as you’d expect. The Veteran Affairs Canada site called Canada Remembers is the portal for all kinds of information about Canada’s involvement in wars over the decades. Here, for example, you can find a link to the official site marking the 90th anniversary of the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele. You’ll also find a link to the area of the site set up especially for Veteran’s Week 2007, with extensive resources for students and anyone else.

One of the most moving resources available at the Veteran Affairs Canada site is a virtual version of the Books of Remembrance, which contain the names of Canadians who fought in wars and died either during or after them and are kept in the Memorial Chamber located in the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. Every page has been digitized, and can be viewed or printed: or you can use an online form to order a copy of a particular page.

Another official site is that of the Canadian War Museum, which offers a Remembrance Kit to promote public understanding of Canada’s military history. It include scans of original postcards, letters, journals, telegrams, photographs, war art, and archival documents.

Library and Archives Canada also has an extensive list of exhibits and collections it has assembled over the years that focus on war and the military, with topics like “The Battle of Passchendaele,” “The Call to Duty: Canada’s Nursing Sisters,” “Canadian War Artists,” “

The Diary of William Lyon Mackenzie King,” “Through a Lens: Dieppe in Photography and Film,” “Victory Bonding: Wartime Messages from Canada’s Government, 1939-1945,” and many more.

The Government of Canada also operates a Canadian Military History Gateway, which in many cases leads you to some of the same sites I’ve already mentioned, but pulls all the links together into one place. There’s a timeline of Canada’s military history, a glossary, links to an online version of the three-volume Canadian Military Heritage series, and a lot more.

There are two other sites I’d particularly like to mention. One is The Memory Project Digital Archive. Initiated by the Dominion Institute, with funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage, it offers hundreds of personal artifacts of more than 1,000 Canadian servicemen and women from across the country, from the First World War through the present. The core of all this are the veteran profiles, each of which includes a number of artifacts provided by the participant, an audio clip of the veteran sharing their story, and a print version of the interview. For example, here’s Margaret Brownlee of Saskatchewan talking about her service in the Motor Transport Division of the Air Force during the Second World War.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention CBC’s own Conflict and War archives, featuring radio and TV clips going back decades, along with links to still more information available online.

More and more Canadians are too young to remember first-hand, or even second-hand through relatives who served, the sacrifices our military have made through the years. But thanks to the World Wide Web, all of us can educate ourselves better about those sacrifices.

On this and every Remembrance Day, it seems to me that’s the least we can do.

The importer of the packs, Kieran Padden, says that business is booming – and for many reasons. “It is so easy to fly,” he claims of the plane that costs a tenth of the original to buy. “Even old Spitfire pilots I have spoken to say it flies just like the original. It’s lighter but has the same performance, so it’s much more agile.”

The V6 engine means that the completed plane will travel at 222 mph and can fly up to 18,000 feet. “The manufacturers have even recreated the sound,” says Mr Padden. “Every time I hear it, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”

Every country involved in the Second World War had some kind of rationing program. Various items were in short supply because they were needed by the military, because of the disruption of trade or because the factories that made them had been turned to military production.

In Canada, the Wartime Prices and Trade Board introduced food rationing on January 24, 1942, and gasoline rationing in April of that year. Sugar was the first type of food rationed; tea, coffee, butter, preserves and fat were rationed later.

Rationing was enforced with coupons, which had to be turned in when supplies were purchased. In all, more than 11 million ration books–one per person–were issued. Innovative solutions were offered by the government to deal with shortages (as someone has said, “The only thing there was never any shortage of was advice.”). For example, housewives were urged to beat milk into their butter to make it go further.

In Great Britain, where rationing was far more strict, the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, came up with even more innovative ideas: whale meat (which had to be soaked overnight in vinegar to be even halfway edible), “Woolton pie” (made of potatoes, parsnips and herbs), carrot fudge, and sausage and sultana casserole.

A greater hardship than the rationing of food in Canada was the rationing of gasoline. (A sign at one gas station read, “No smoking near gas pumps–maybe your life is not worth saving, but gasoline is!”) Car pools were encouraged, just as they are today to reduce pollution, and drivers fine-tuned their engines to get maximum mileage. Public transport was swamped, so office and plant hours were staggered, and seats in buses and streetcars were changed so they could hold more passengers. The number of bus stops was reduced to save gasoline. Those who had gasoline for their cars developed the dangerous habit of switching off the gas and coasting down hills (probably not a common practice here in Saskatchewan, where hills, although not rationed, have always been in short supply).

The shortage of gas sparked the creativity of inventors, who came up with gas-frugal contraptions such as bicycles powered by washing-machine engines and a plywood car with wheelbarrow tires, which, powered by a rear-mounted two-cylinder air-cooled engine, managed up to 45 miles to the gallon. Of course, its top speed was only 35 mph.

Power had to be conserved for war production, so in 1942 Toronto dimmed street lights, turned off store-window display lights, asked people to avoid turning on house lights as long as possible and banned outdoor Christmas lighting.

Even clothing was rationed. Regulations completely changed the look of fashion, banning certain design elements that took lots of cloth, such as French cuffs. “Frills and furbelows” were out, replaced by slim, spartan designs.

Today’s “blue boxes” have nothing on the sorting of trash that went on in the ’40s. Household bones were separated out of the garbage, as were rags and old clothing, metal scrap (everything from pots and pans to the brass ends of light bulbs), and paper.

Bones were used to make glue for airplanes and glycerin for explosives. Paper and cardboard cartons became food containers and rifle and shell cases. One old envelope could make a cartridge wad. An old aluminum pot could become part of a new Spitfire in short order and a rusty iron chain might become part of a new corvette. Old sweaters were unraveled and re-knitted as socks and scarves for the troops. (One Alberta woman even salvaged wool which sheep rubbed off on trees and fence posts; on one trip she collected enough to make a suit for an airman.)

“Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do and Do Without” and “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are different slogans for different wars, but they’re very similar in intent. Even though environmental concern had nothing to do with the nation-wide effort to conserve and recycle resources between 1939 and 1945, the zeal with which people pitched in shows what citizens are willing to do in a worthwhile cause.

If that kind of zeal can be harnessed in today’s battle for the environment, maybe in 50 years we’ll have another great victory to celebrate in a clean and healing world.

Today, of course, is the 50th anniversary of D-Day: the greatest amphibious operation in history. General Eisenhower’s plan called for the Allies to put ashore 120,000 troops and 14,000 vehicles by the end of the first day. More than 6,000 vessels supported the assault.

Among the vehicles put ashore by the slab-sided landing craft were some of the strangest machines ever seen on a battlefield–and many of them had their genesis in an earlier raid whose name is all too familiar to Canadians: Dieppe. In August, 1942, the Allies raided Dieppe with 6,000 troops and a force of Churchill tanks. They lost 3,500 men and most of their armor. One result of that disaster was further fortification of the French coast by the Germans, with steel and concrete obstacles designed to cripple landing craft, plus barbed wire, forts, pillboxes and huge, fortified artillery emplacements. But another result was a recognition by the Allies that they would need new, specialized kinds of armored fighting vehicles if they were to successfully invade France.

In March of 1943 Major General Sir Percy Hobart, who had commanded the famous British “Desert Rats” armored division in North Africa, was summoned to London to meet with General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Brooke wanted to raise a new armored division charged with developing, training and using a variety of special-purpose armored fighting vehicles to lead the Allies into France. Hobart was put in charge of Britain’s 79th Armoured Division, devoted to that purpose.

When the Allies hit the beaches on D-Day, many of “Hobart’s Funnies,” as the products of the 79th Armoured Division were known, were also thrown into the fray.

One of the things Dieppe had made clear was that a landing craft big enough to carry nine tanks was also a dangerously inviting target for enemy gunners, offering them the opportunity to eliminate a large chunk of the invading force’s armour with a single well-placed shell. For D-Day, the answer was to build a tank that could “swim” ashore after emerging from the landing craft at a relatively safe distance from the enemy. Tanks had been floated before, but conventional flotation devices wouldn’t fit in the landing craft. The new solution for D-Day was a nine-foot-high canvas screen attached to the vehicles hull with a waterproof seal. Air-filled rubber tubes and a simple metal frame gave it a boat-like shape–and also enabled the tank to float, just as you can make a brick float by putting it inside a floating bucket. The canvas walls took no more space than the tank did on the landing craft, could be raised in about 15 minutes, and too only seconds to lower once the tank hit the beach.

In addition to their treads, the “Duplex Drive” tanks had two propellers, driven by the main engines, which enabled them to glide through calm water at a brisk walking pace. Unfortunately, they were vulnerable to waves. The U.S. Army, for example, launched 64 floating Sherman tanks off Omaha Beach. Thirty-two of those were intended to support the First Infantry Division; all but five of them sank.

Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division, however, had better luck: 33 of the 40 Churchill tanks they launched almost three miles offshore of Sword Beach reached the shore. The canvas hulls looked so harmless that no case was reported of anti-tank fire being directed at them while they were afloat. The amount of armour successfully landed was thus doubled over what might have been expected with traditional methods.

Many other of “Hobart’s Funnies” were also modified Churchill AVRE tanks (AVRE stands for Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers). One problem faced by armoured vehicles on the beaches of Normandy was areas of blue clay that could swallow vehicles. The solution was a device called the Bobbin: an enormous reel of course hessian cloth, reinforced with steel poles and carried on a frame at the front of the Churchill tank. As the tank advanced, the cloth unrolled beneath its treads, providing a relatively secure footing for itself and following tanks until combat engineers could provide a more permanent solution in the form of perforated steel plates.

Mines were exploded by tanks equipped with hefty chains that ended in fist-sized steel balls. The chains flailed the ground as the tank inched forward. These specially equipped tanks were known as “Crabs.” The military still uses similar devices to explode mines: in the IMAX movie Fires of Kuwait, there’s a scene of a mine being detonated by a remote-controlled device that also flails the ground with chains.

Among the defenses faced by the invaders were ramparts and ditches high and deep enough to stop tanks. But the Allies also had special machinery to overcome them, beginning with an armored bulldozer used to fill in craters and recover bogged-down machinery. Then there was the Fascine, a bundle of wooden poles about eight feet in diameter, lashed together with stout wires, sort of like really heavy-duty snow fencing. It rested on the front of a Churchill tank and could be released to bridge a ditch or form a step at the base of a wall. Unfortunately, it was so bulky it required the tank’s commander to either operate blind or direct operations from the top of the bundle, not the place you wanted to be during a battle.

A more sophisticated solution was the Armored Ramp Carrier, built by, among others, the MG Car company. This was a turretless tank that had ramps attached to the front and rear that could be extended to almost fifty feet. . Other vehicles could roll up one set of ramps, across the flat top of the vehicle, and up the other set of ramps to scale all kinds of awkward obstacles, such as seawalls.

Finally, there was the SBG (Small Box Girder) assault bridge, a huge device transported on the nose of a tank that could be lowered to span gaps as much as 30 feet wide, and which could support loads of up to forty tons.

Not all of Hobart’s Funnies were purely engineering-related. The most spectacular came along just after D-Day. Called the Crocodile, it was a Churchill tank whose machine gun was replaced with a flamethrower with a range of about 200 yards. The Crocodile pulled a trailer containing about 400 gallons of fuel.

The 79th Armoured Division eventually totalled almost 7,000 vehicles. It was disbanded on August 20, 1945, just five months after one of its amphibian vehicles carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Rhine River. Field Marshall Montgomery wrote, “The record of the Division is unique and its contribution to the winning of the Campaign in northwest Europe incalculable.”

Not bad for a bunch of “funnies.”

UPDATE: In 2002 I received the following e-mail from L. C. Smith in Queensland, Australia:

Dear Sir,

While reading your page I see that you say that the Churchill MKV11 flame tank came out just after D-Day. I would just like to let you know that my father served with the 79th Armoured Div. 141st RAC The Buffs 31st Tank Brigade B.SQ. He landed on Juno beach on D-Day and he was a driver of a Churchill MKV11 flame tank. The name on the side of his tank was “Skipper.” I hope you do not think I am being rude sending you this e-mail; I just thought you would like to know this.